Self Reporting

I'm going to try to go through a hack a day in Mind Hacks: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain. The first hack just gives some background on cognitive psychology and science, and this sentence stuck out to me:

Another problem with trying to guess how the mind works is that you can't trust people when they offer their opinion on why they did something or how they did it.

I think this sentence was poorly worded because it's not necessarily true that you can't trust people when they offer their opinion about something they did. The way that the author wrote the sentence seemed (to me, at least) to assert you can never trust what someone says about why or how they did something. In light of everyday experience and logic, you can trust people to offer why or how they did something, it's just not a rule. The simple reason being ego (making yourself look like what you are not). But just because you can't always trust everyone doesn't mean that you can't trust someone in certain situations. Two simple examples:

• I can trust my mom telling me that she gave me a car because I am her son and she loves me.
• I can trust my friend who is out of the country when he writes e-mails to me because he misses me.

Other than that, the first hack wasn't that interesting, but just briefly implicitly mentioned that the mind and brain are not distinct, and that's what should be kept in mind when reading the book.

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